Dear Tulane administration and whoever else is responsible for booking the 2018 commencement speaker,

Let me cut to the chase – what in the heck is going on? In recent memory, Tulane’s commencement speaker has always been announced by early March AT THE LATEST. It is now mid-April and we have no updates, which means all of us are sitting around twiddling our thumbs, reminiscing on past speakers and gradually lowering our standards for who an acceptable speaker would be.

The truth of the matter is that the Class of 2018 deserves nothing short of the best. We are the class that brought you Jesse McCartney, T-Pain, Sam Levin, probably some okay athletes, not to mention THE Mike Fitts. And we know Tulane can deliver the goods. Need I remind you of the 2017 commencement when DAME Helen Mirren graced the Superdome stage with her infinite wisdom, or the 2015 commencement when Maya Rudolph made us proud to be Americans?

And yes, I’m skipping 2016’s Hoda Kotb but she, too, is at least semi-famous! In 2013, Tulane had His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama – and that’s his real life name!

Look – we have worked hard on our liberal arts educations for four years. We’ve read your Views from Gibson, we’ve stomached Zagat-rated™ Bruff Commons, we’ve lived in your mold-infested residence halls, we’ve tolerated weird rules and followed silly procedures and allowed our hair and sweat glands to be permanently damaged by our humidity-ridden walks to class every day for four years. We’ve done all this, all the while thinking that at the end of the tunnel, we’d have some sort of payoff, some celebrity – any celebrity – to pat us on the backs and tell us it was all worth it.

We need to be able to look up to the stage in May and be able to know that four years of filling our souls with watered down coffee on weeknights and watered down vodka sodas on weekends was worth it. We need to be able to have our parents, many of whom are flying in from across the country, be able to look to that stage and assure themselves that taking out a second mortgage on the house to pay for our private educations was worth it. We need to be able to send YouTube videos of our commencement to our friends from high school and have them say, “WOW Tulane is awesome and way better than this state school I went to that you almost went to but thsought you were too good for!”

We ask – nay, demand – that you tell us who our commencement speaker is and that it be someone amazingly wonderful and hilarious and famous. We’re not asking for much, just an A-list celeb who is inspirational and relatable and funny and who can tell us they didn’t go to college but that they’re proud of us for graduating.

And if you’re thinking of having anyone who is currently or has previously been employed by Tulane, or who lives within a two mile radius of campus (read: any of the Mannings), then please plan on opening a Boot tab the morning of graduation and accounting for the Class of 2018’s and all of our family’s first round of pre-commencement drinks in the Only the Audacious budget.

Thank you for your consideration,

A Senior Who Needs Answers